Day 87: ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition

I’m purchasing an Xbox Live Indie Game every day, seeking out the quality titles that got lost in the shuffle and no longer appear in the top 50 downloads. Today is day #87, and today’s game is “ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition”.

Ever since its May 2009 debut, ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition has been raved about as incredibly easy to use loop-based music creation software, with one simple flaw: the inability to export your songs. A recent massive update to ezmuze+ has not only solved that problem, but cut the price in half too. This has gone from good to great, and is now an absolute must-have.

Ezmuze+ can help anyone make music, no matter how much or how little experience you have. The software provides an absolutely massive collection of song clips that you can loop to create music. When you start up the software, hit the “Back” button and explore the detailed tutorials, and in no time you’ll be cutting and pasting song loops and linking them together to show your DJ skills.

This has been a top selling title for XBL Indie Games, despite the fact that it’s one of the few titles on the service that (until a few days ago) still cost 800 Microsoft Points. When the channel was called Xbox Live Community Games, the price points were 200, 400, and 800 MSP. When Community Games was rebranded Xbox Live Indie Games, the new price points became the now familiar 80, 240, and 400 MSP, but a few titles chose to remain grandfathered at 800. If any of those games (or, in this case, non-game) do a title update, they must convert to one of the three new prices. This amounts to a permanent 50% price drop for one of the absolute best pieces of software on the Indie Games channel, despite a huge host of upgrades in the v1.5 update, including:

Here are is a list of changes to the update (not complete) to wet your appetites:

– New smoother playback engine (much less clicks and pauses)
– new display engine (far less memory usage, smoother scrolling)
– new menu system (easier to navigate – looks prettier)
– net network core with new features:
a) Send from file list (not just currently loaded song)
b) Operate as server (people can request songs from your shared list)
c) Send song to ezmuze central for entry into ezmuze idol or download as mp3.
– new audition system – allows loops to be listened to as whole loop instead of slices
– improved controls – much less to remember and much faster to use
– true copy+paste system with copy buffer
– massively improved realtime VIS – 3 new vis effects, the old one improved
– new editor display – slice breaks so easy to see when you change from one slice to another – and loop names above loops for hidef users
– new image/audio handler – loads and unloads resources on demand massively reducing memory requirements – removing the out of memory crashes
– new file system – allows much more detail in the file list

Those A, B, and C sub-points are perhaps the most significant updates. The ability to upload your songs to the developer’s server, and then download them as an .mp3, plus new options to share your creations with others, solve the one thing that many reviewers noted was holding the software back.

If you have ever so much as idly tapped out a tune with your fingers when you were bored, you can create music with ezmuze+. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, and the software has the amazing ability to be both relatively easy to get into yet powerful enough to grow with you. If you have even the slightest interest in music creation, this is 400 Microsoft Points very, very well spent.

For a second opinion, check out Kobun’s review of ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition.

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